One of my predictions back in January was that there would be no more predictions from me — that I would retire or otherwise significantly change what I do in this space at some point during the year. Well that point — the first of several, actually — is almost here. If my PBS blog was Cringely 1.0 and this space has been Cringely 2.0, get ready for Cringely 3.0, which will start subtly in a couple weeks with a change in how I use advertising on this rag.

We read a lot about how newspapers and magazines are dying at the hands of the Internet but there is hardly anything written about how the Internet is dying at its own hands, too. That’s certainly what’s been happening here. My advertising revenue from this blog is down 75 percent over the last 18 months despite an increase in readership. I suspect something like this is happening across the board. You haven’t read about it not because it isn’t newsworthy but what publication is going to narc on itself? Only me.

There’s a structural problem with the Internet news business that is slowly killing that golden goose. At the same time Internet publications are undercutting paper ones, Internet ad networks are killing the very web sites they serve. Ironic, eh?

Here’s the problem. The ads on this rag come from IDG TechNet, which is no worse as far as I can tell than any other ad network. They purport to represent a lot of tech advertisers but you may notice that not all the ads here are about technology and sometimes Google ads are even inserted to replace the banner at the top. The fact is that while IDG TechNet or any other ad network would like to sell all ads for top dollar, there’s always more space available than ads in the current economy, so they take what they can get for that extra space.

This wouldn’t happen in quite the same way at publications that have their own ad sales teams. The key difference is there’s no feedback between IDG TechNet and constituent web sites like mine and no shared understanding whatsoever about our respective financial situations. It’s every man for himself. This has led to a precipitous drop in ad rates.

You see IDG TechNet plays no role in the financing of this blog or buying shoes for my kids. They don’t know what my costs are nor do they care. All they care about is selling every ad for whatever they can get, which these days isn’t very much. If blogs like this one sold our own ads we’d deliberately limit supply to keep prices up. But it’s too late to do that now, because even if some of us sold our own ads most would still use ad networks and the downward effect would continue. Those of us trying to maintain ad rates would just be hurting ourselves because that game is already lost.

It’s gotten so bad that for readers from places like Kazakhstan where IDG TechNet perceives no valid business, the ad network charges me a fee for not sending ads.

So the advertising business model is broken and unlikely to be saved. Even moving ad sales in house won’t likely change that. That doesn’t necessarily mean an end to life as we know it here, just a change of business model.

I could go to a patronage model as Robert Scoble has done so successfully first with Seagate and now Rackspace. But I don’t like to be so directly beholden to an outfit I’ll inevitably insult and Scoble’s grammar is so bad that I simply can’t see myself emulating him in any way.

I could go to a subscription model, charging you an annual fee for reading. That’s the so-called pay wall that has become so popular with newspaper web sites for exactly this reason, though they never explain it this clearly. The problem I have with subscriptions is that they deliberately limit readership and I want as many readers as possible, not just because I have a big ego but because I’ve always made more money from public speaking than from writing and the more readers I have the more speaking gigs (and TV shows) I’m likely to get.

So I’ve chosen Door Number Three, which involves booting the ad network in favor of using strictly house ads. I’m going to sell ads only to myself because as an advertiser I’m stupid enough to pay whatever I demand. What a patsy!

This is all funny money, of course — good for money laundering and nothing else — that is unless I actually come up with something to sell. And so I have.

While I could have gone with t-shirts or coffee mugs and even took a serious look at doing a Cringely Android phone, we’ll start by selling words. I’ve set up an eBook publishing operation called Cringely Media that’s a new division of NeRDTV. We’ll publish 5-10 eBooks in the coming year that I’ll write on the sort of topics I tend to cover here, most of them sold for very reasonable prices in the $1.99 range, which I hope will make them attractive as gifts.

That’s Cringely 3.0, which begins in a couple weeks. Then December will bring Cringely 3.1, which will be something really different.

90 Comments

Sounds like an exciting change, nice to see you continuing to creatively transform your work. I just wanted to point out that what strikes me is the number of Flash ads that appear on your blog. As someone with a Flash blocker (as probably many readers here have) most of the ads on this blog don’t even come through. I see the right column Google ads but that’s about it (except in the case of the rare animated gif).

I dunno if all non-Flash ads would help your ad revenue, but it may be statistically significant if many of your readers don’t ever see 90+% of your ads in the first place.

How big of a problem are Flash blockers as well as full on ad blockers to Internet advertising services in general?

Well the die is cast in any case, but I can’t imagine that our house ads will use Flash. In fact I know they won’t.

Mark
November 3, 2012 at 10:35 am

I use a Java script blocker and I don’t even see ads on your website (and many others). I use it for security reasons (got a particularly nasty trojan through Java once), but there are two google scripts that appear on nearly all web pages (but not yours!) that I don’t allow (analytics and syndication) for the ad blocking/tracking blocking. This is something that may bite more and more into ad revenues as well.

No sockets — Cringely 3.1 will be the really big deal — a major change in content for the site.

That English Bloke
November 2, 2012 at 9:54 am

Thanks to the excellent Adblock Plus I’d never realised you have adverts. Among your tech-savvy readership I guess that’s common.

Edmund
November 3, 2012 at 3:40 am

Same here – I’ve just now been repeatedly “allowing” noscript to permit site after site on this page only to see nothing until I saw your post. It was Adblocker – I guess you could say the Adblocker is killing the Internet but really that’s not the case … it’s my aversion to seeing junk adverts – and the all too frequent malware that comes in via infected adverts that make me run Adblocker on every machine I control.

I can see how Bob needs to sell advertisements to put shoes on his kids feet and while I sympathize with this need, I’m not about to allow adverts through my filters here simply because so many of them are completely irrelevant and so often you sit there waiting for a page to load because some advert site is having problems loading … nope – adverts suck but if you can get money from the suckers selling the adverts then good for you.

How many people here actually believe that adverts on internet sites like this actually sell anything anyway?

Kevin G
November 4, 2012 at 6:34 am

I have never clicked on an advert, and rarely click anything that will take me off the site I’m viewing. I’ve always figured it must be me, otherwise why would anyone buy an ad? I loved your analogy with the airplane engine by the way.

Derek
November 2, 2012 at 9:54 am

I was really hoping for NerdTV Season 2 to be mentioned somehow. 🙂 Where do I send my money for that?

Fraser Orr
November 2, 2012 at 10:02 am

I think you are missing one key reason ad revenues are down, and that is the rise of RSS readers, especially on mobile phones. I enjoy your column but the fact is that I never even see the ads since I always read the feed either online or on my phone. In fact your web site is blocked at work, so RSS is the only way I can read it.

Perhaps embedding the ad in your RSS feed text would be a big help.

Erik Neu
November 2, 2012 at 11:42 am

I agree RSS Readers. And don’f forget Read Later apps–Instapaper, Pocket. That is how I read almost everything nowadays. It is much more pleasant than native format.

Agree – I only see your ads if I come to your site to comment — and usually I’m too dumb to have valuable input on the discussion. And even then, I had to scroll back up to even find the ad and it blended into the page. A CPA firm, a Cadillac SUV and something from Citrix that has a name that makes me think of Dropbox. But here where I spend the time focusing on the screen as I write – no ads. 7″ column with 5″ of whitespace on the left and 10″ of whitespace on the right (on this monitor, at least). Seems like if the Cadillac ad were set to float down the page, maybe I’d read up on it.

But my problem with internet advertising is it doesn’t do a great job of serving up what’s relevant. I was looking for a car. I bought a car. I filed a complaint against the Nissan dealership here in town with the Better Business Bureau and others before I ended up buying a Ford.

Google still really really wants me to buy a car. Especially a Nissan.

Reinier
November 3, 2012 at 5:36 am

Indeed. The rss feed should not contain the whole text of the article. It should just show the first lines. So people will click to the site and see the ads.

Zoran
November 4, 2012 at 5:04 am

I don’t subsribe to RSS feeds that publish partial articles. Downlading full web pages is slow on my iphone, and impossible during my subway commute.

Chris Morrison
November 2, 2012 at 10:02 am

I don’t see your ads when I read your articles in Google Reader. Some of my other feeds do include ads. Is Google removing the ads from IDG TechNet? Anyway, I enjoy the things that you write (even the articles about the housing market, etc.) so I’m willing to give Cringley 3.0+ a chance.

Roy
November 2, 2012 at 10:02 am

Why cut off the ad revenue? Why not milk that as long as you can and also start up the publishing experiment? A little bit of money from the ad network is better than nothing, no?

Growing boys eat a lot, after all…

Travers
November 2, 2012 at 10:15 am

The problem of CONTENT is that the marginal value I get from most websites is much, much less than they would charge for a paywall.

For example, I don’t get enough value from the NYT to pay their $15/month. I’d maybe pay $15 per YEAR for the small amount of content I get from them — mostly Paul Krugman’s blog. The Economist is a good magazine, but I only read articles other people link to. 90% of a website’s readership only gets a very marginal value from it.

I know the old idea was micropayments, but I think we can do better than that. I noticed that the pre-paid card market is growing quite rapidly; I can now buy iTunes and xBox Live credits at Wal-Mart. What if people bought such cards for content networks? Then I use one of those federated Single Sign-On sites (like Google or Facebook), and register my pre-paid card. Then I can safely surf to paywalled sites and behind the scenes, algorithms figure out how to dish out the cash to the subscribing sites.

The NY Times has a large family of content so Alice buys a NY Times card from Wal-Mart. She logs in to her NY Times account and registers the card. Now she can play her Monday crossword (’cause that’s the easiest one) every week and her account is deducted micropayment style (say 25 cents?). The 25 cents per player is way more than it costs the NY Times to pay Will Shortz to make the puzzle so it subsidizes the rest of the content. Everyone wins.

curtis
November 2, 2012 at 5:19 pm

Great idea.

I can see the rub would, of course, be getting the sites to trust the card issuer, particularly if it was a noobie one. Probably a minor detail.

grant
November 2, 2012 at 10:31 am

Have you considered the sponsorship model that daringfireball seem to be using successfully?

I’ve been reading your site for many years, and I had no idea you carried advertising. I’ve never seen an ad on your site. I still don’t. You can thank my browser’s ad blocking extension & Google Reader for that.

[…] Link. It’s a bubble, now bursting. A new net is waiting to be born. by jgordon on November 2, 2012 • Permalink Posted in share Tagged pinboard […]

John
November 2, 2012 at 12:44 pm

I can not wait to see more published “stuff” from you. Thanks for the continued effort to put all manner of issues and tech in perspective with the actual real world.

Randy Lea
November 2, 2012 at 12:56 pm

I like the short ebook idea. Also, I’d really like it if you could tweak your email subscription for the blog to work with my @free.kindle.com account. I’d prefer to read it there.

Nigel
November 2, 2012 at 1:02 pm

Yes, I’m looking forward to whatever’s next – bound to be interesting!! 🙂

On the broader subject of page adverts – I suspect we’re all becoming a bit jaded by this once novel way of promoting products, copying newspapers but with – supposedly – more relevant ads.

Though I used to see a properly filtered bunch of UK adverts here (none today – just the tag cloud) I’ve never bought anything. To be honest I wouldn’t trust them unless I was 100% sure of the company they represented anyway. Then I’d have to check the link wasn’t a spoof etc… etc… etc… Nowadays clicking an unsolicited link is a risky business. Perhaps more ad servers should realise a tech-savvy audiences reserve!

Finding a suitable and viable business model now that the Internet is mature must be a tricky business. I like the ebook idea and will be happy to buy because I know where the advert is coming from and what I’m getting.

Bob, I must confess, I don’t see you ads either. It’s not that I have a problem with ‘print’ ads, but I do have a problem with distractions. Web site ads, with their animations, compete with their site for attention and with me they usually succeed. I have to block them in order to be able to read the site.

Even TV ads, annoying as they are with their frequent interruptions, don’t require the views to watch them and the show at the same time.

I’ve been a reader since the last century and look forward to future columns. I expect with your expertise, you’ll be able to get around our ad blockers on the new web site. Please structure the site to the avoid attention conflicts that are so prevalent on many other sites.

Riley
November 2, 2012 at 2:39 pm

Unmoderated growth is the credo of both advertising and the cancer cell. Not incidentally, both end up killing their hosts.

Francis
November 2, 2012 at 2:47 pm

Cool. Sell merchandise. I heard, but don’t know if it’s true, that studios don’t really make money from movies, because they have to pay the actors so much. But the movies do drive business to the theme parks, and that’s where a tidy profit can be turned. Even if Disney doesn’t make money from Star Wars, they will make money from Star Wars attractions at the Disney Parks worldwide. So it kind of makes sense.

But surely google is still making money from ads, aren’t they?

Stan
November 2, 2012 at 3:36 pm

If you go to an internal ad server let us ad-block users know what it is so we can unblock it.

You might even look at the ad-block option of getting added to their internal whitelist.

I block a lot of ad sites. And it seems to me the simple way to stop people cutting off your ads is to have them on the same server as your content, then there’s no meaningful way to block them.

paul allen
November 2, 2012 at 3:57 pm

maybe you should make ads that advertise the chance to buy ad space on your site.

Julia
November 2, 2012 at 3:58 pm

Cringe, this is a total non-sequitur, but if you write an article about Scott Forstall’s getting booted from Apple (all the other musical chairs are less interesting), I’ll buy your first ebook the day it comes out.

If you want to run your own ads and want a simple tool to manage it (including transactions) check out

skyscrpr.com/

This is not my gig, it just kicks ass.

David
November 2, 2012 at 4:44 pm

Long term reader and admirer here, but I’ve only ever seen your blogs in RSS readers so had no idea you even had ads. I’m in Australia, so it’s unlikely I’ll be meeting you face to face to say “thanks”. Paywall option would be fine with me, assuming the costs are reasonable. iTunes subscription would be OK too (assuming it’s not too painful to deliver content via Apple’s Newsstand). By all means bring on the merchandise and ebooks (in particular), but make sure you mention them in your blog rather than just in your own ads so that people like myself actually know they exist. Not sure what the economics are like, but if I can buy stuff on PayPal or Amazon that’s what I’m most comfortable with. Brian Dunning at skeptoid.com keeps trying to come up with a viable micropayments scheme for his podcasts; maybe there’s scope for building a better platform than already exists today. Not my field, but maybe there’s a critical mass of people (including yourself) out there all looking for the same thing; if so, is that a crowdsourcing opportunity?

Bob, this article is basically the story I tell my students about the state of media. Congratulations on moving into Cringely 3.0! Your blog stories generating more comprehensive, for-sale eBooks and promoting your speaking engagements and TV shows is terrific.

Hopefully in a year you’ll share with us that this transition is bringing you more money, speaking engagements and TV shows! Congratulations!

You are on a winning ticket here Bob. Ditch the ad agencies and leverage your loyal audience with extra content and product that they will want to buy from you, with added Extra Cringley Goodness of course.
I now make my full time living from direct advertising on my blog (no agencies!) and the usual (20% kinda small-ish) Youtube revenue. But like you I ultimately need to branch out like this into 3.0 with extra detailed branded content people will want to buy and/or my own products. More detailed tutorial videos, ebooks, my own gadgets and merch etc.
That way the usual blog material stays free for all, and we can continue to feed our kids with income from the extra bonus pay-if-you-want-it material.

Yes, the subscription model is a losing ticket for bloggers. It just drives both your existing and new audiences away, and puts pressure on to produce regular high quality content. Screw that. Much better to do one-off bonus content at your leisure and sell that separately.

Looking forward to it.

Peter
November 2, 2012 at 6:29 pm

I’ve always thought the whole internet ad idea, including “directed” ads, is not long for this world. That is not to say they will completely disappear, but the bubble will burst and the money available will be a lot less than so many business plans currently being circulated assume. It will collapse like every other “magic bullet” scheme that has been invented since the first marketer was hatched – when the novelty has worn off sufficiently, you’ve got move on to something else.

I think I can count on one hand, with several fingers left over, the number of ads I have intentionally clicked on. I’ve clicked on more as a result of failures of my hand-eye co-ordination system. I doubt that I am unusual (in this respect).

Rich the Mongoose
November 2, 2012 at 7:21 pm

Well said. The ad market has gone to the dogs and I hate subscription sites. Commoditization of the Internet has arrived along with the government snooping. Maybe it’s time for another “Internet” free from carriers and other distractions and surveillance.

Some sites have even resorted to soft porn threads to increase readership and thus increase the falling ad revenue with more page counts.

The e-book idea is a great one. You should have the readers be able to submit some. I might even volunteer to author some myself.

If the next incantation of the portal of your ego to the public is such a major change, why not call it “Cringley 4.0”?

Anne P
November 2, 2012 at 10:48 pm

I too have never seen any ads with your column/blog but it comes into my email — but even going to your site, I’ve never seen an ad.

A genealogy newsletter I subscribe to has a free version and a paid version but ebooks would be a similar method.

I don’t paypal but I do iTunes.

Ben Combee
November 2, 2012 at 11:08 pm

As a RSS reader & AdBlock Plus user, I’ve never seen ads on this feed. However, I’m very interested in more content from you, especially in a paid form. Therefore, I hope you mention in the articles when you’ve got new things for sale in addition to pushing them in ad space on the site… I’d like to hear about them.

Let’s see — different content. Okay, with your insight into emerging technologies, you could publish a stock tip sheet for upcoming technology companies.

Then there are all those videos of the interviews from the first phase of Cringely’s Startup Tour. You might be able to sell a package of those interviews for a few bucks.

Then you could run some contests where people send in their own predictions, along with an entry fee. The winner would get a cash prize and/or a special write-up.

And of course, you might be able to start an employment service for technology workers seeking greener pastures (or any pastures).

Finally, there may be some way to write exposes of various types of corruptions in the fields you follow. Maybe this could turn into a monthly publication.

Offer Kaye
November 2, 2012 at 11:30 pm

Good luck Bob, with both Cringely 3.0 and 3.1.

Personally I think people above are correct about AdBlock and RSS Feeders contributing to the problem. Both issues are relevant to my case and to be honest I tend to forget I have AdBlock installed 🙂

But I think the above issues are not the main culprits. Maybe it’s just the economy causing people to click less on adds?

Dr John
November 3, 2012 at 3:17 am

For my business I used to advertise on a website AV Forums in the UK. But the guy who ran that forum decided he was giving away too my “impressions” so cut down what you were getting by a factor of 10. At the same time he increased the number of adverts being shown on each page, so you were even less likely to be advertised. Before this it was worthwhile advertising with him, afterwards you were just advertising to support his forum and nothing else.

Visiting his site now there’s so many adverts and other BS on the main page you can’t find where the forums are! So you then have to run an Ad-Blocker, and if you’ve got a few windows open with any browser Flash just kills your machine. So again you’ve got a very good reason to use something that also blocks all those adverts (is Flash used for anything else???).

Cringely, however, is a site that I visit on my non-ad-blocking browser (I use two different browsers, I trust the Cringely site therefore it’s on the non-blocking browser). There is a tipping point with advertising. Too much and people will switch off, but just enough on each page and people will respond.

Zoran
November 3, 2012 at 6:15 am

khm, khm, may I remind you, Bob, about this:

“What the Dickens? Accidental Empires Rebooted
Posted in 2012 on February 7th, 2012 by Robert X. Cringely
…..
So next month I’ll be starting a second blog…”

I see no ads. I am even trying to see them, what I get is the article, three related posts pictures, comments and the animated cloud applet in the right sidebar.

This is just plain vanilla IE9. I even tried look at the site with firefox
with all the adblockers suspended – still no ads. . .

slap
November 3, 2012 at 7:26 pm

If you are running adblock plus, you can set it to automatically turn off when visiting certain websites. I’ve got it set so I can see all of the ads here.

Jacko
November 4, 2012 at 12:22 am

Bob,
Did you ever consider using your friend John C Dvorak’s formula, where you’d essentially ask/beg for donations? I recall his partner Adam Curry mentioning that they were both netting over $400k each just from donations. May be something to consider, wouldn’t take much to add a donate button or page. I’m sure i speak for most of your readers when i say we don’t want to see you go away.

I think the problem with the ad networks is they don’t share enough of the revenue with their sites. All they have to do is give Bob more than he’d get from the Google display ad network. It’s difficult to know if your site would get more from another ad network so jumping networks isn’t worth the hassle.

mdv
November 4, 2012 at 3:03 pm

Best of luck with Cringley 3.0. I wish you could find a way to work some of your interviews (video or podcasts) into your content. You know a lot of interesting people and have the background to ask the right questions. I’d pay to see them.

Thanks for being straight with us on this. You are a valued voice and a trusted source. I remember all the “internet money” that was going to change things in 1999 – and we’ve gone through recycled versions of that peak/bust cycle a couple of times now. The lack of revenue from “mobile” has been touted widely, while no one has been admitting to the overall lack of revenue from advertising, period.

Since I’ve come back to the vineyards of public media, it’s been interesting to see how I missed a wave of the failed solutions. The ultimate solution is to be good at what you do. Bob, you are, and I am very glad your insightful work is going to continue.

BobRuub
November 4, 2012 at 4:59 pm

One model used by tech pundit Jerry Pournelle is a voluntary subscription model. seems to cover his costs. However, he a: doesn’t have kids to put through college and b: has income from his novels.

dcline
November 4, 2012 at 5:19 pm

FWIW, I never see ads and I’m using Opera with Ghostery as my only extension, auto load flash content turned off and no JAVA installed.

You should form an alliance with about twenty other tech writers you respect and then use the sidebars for small display ads to each others blogs. If you keep the ad buttons consistent and in the same location on each other’s blogs, it could be a kind of navigation system for “super blog.” Think the “New York Times” of tech blogs.

Bob, you’re just the guy to pull that off.

B.J.
blanejackson.com

mark hewis
November 6, 2012 at 1:06 pm

followed you for years. sometimes you mention products ( bufferbloat router bypass in particular ) where a simple ‘click here to buy’ where you get a 10% cut seems sane.would have to be in story so I would notice it and have intersticial to say what is going on.

sure you have something way smarter in mind though.

Suze Semprini
November 8, 2012 at 2:42 pm

Hmmmm, I didn’t even realize you had ads until you mentioned them. A reminder that my ad blocker is working well!

RegW
November 8, 2012 at 3:24 pm

Well Bob if you solve this one, lots of us will be interested in how it goes.

Personally I tolerated the ads for ages. My thinking being that if you read the content then you should take the ads – that’s the deal. However, The Register started running some where a picture of a phone danced about if front of each page I was trying to read. Since then AdBlockPlus has been slowing getting applied to all big ad servers as they try too hard to intrude.

In the world of video-on-demand the ads are a bit different. The ads get delivered before or during the content as part of the package – just like on TV. You can’t fast forward over them, and if you block them then you simply don’t get to the content. However, as a reward you don’t get as many as on TV, and often if you rewind or replay – you don’t have to watch them again. Who knows how long this will last.

May be there is another way to make money from static content without a pay-wall or a weighty sponsor. I wonder.

Gordon Zaft
November 8, 2012 at 3:37 pm

I too like the short e-book idea. At that price point there’s not much thought involved, and as e-books they can be turned around quickly and cheaply.

Will these be sold through Amazon? If not be sure to have some kind of social media link so I can share the titles I’ve bought (not content, lol) with my geek friends.

Ad blocker users, seriously are ads that annoying to you that you’re willing to bankrupt the websites you like?

I really don’t purchase much, so I’m fine with seeing a few ads to get the content I want. And one in thousand of them might actually be useful.

And I agree Bob, selling things directly seems to be the only way a ‘little guy’ can make a living off the internet. I work in video and would love to work full time on my own site, but the money is not there.

Good Luck!

Ronc
November 9, 2012 at 3:25 pm

“Ad blocker users, seriously are ads that annoying to you that you’re willing to bankrupt the websites you like?” Once you reach my demographic, you’re not influenced by ads so the company’s bottom line won’t be affected. Sometimes ads have a negative affect on sales…I will never buy Crest toothpaste simply because of the TV ad blitz they promulgated in the 60s. So by blocking the ads I’m more likely to buy the product since it hasn’t been annoying me.

I’ve been thinking about getting a parrot and what I really need you to write is a guide to that. Something that can tell me the *secrets* about keeping a *parrot*.

Charles Calthrop
November 9, 2012 at 6:03 pm

You need to check out Pottermore. If you buy the Kindle version of Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal from Amazon, you are sent to Pottermore to buy it. If you download the sample version on an iPad you are given the choice of reading it on Kindle or iBooks. If you choose iBooks, you can then return to Pottermore to buy the entire book. Rowling has circumvented the Apple 30%.

Good luck. I hope to read your books on my iPad with iBooks, your blessing, and the belief that your kids are being fed.

Hmm. So ebooks it is then. I had a feeling when I read, “Facebook, Cringely and the devolution of the web”, that it could be a viable experiment for you because of your desire to write and create. But I sense you also like to be in charge and this vehicle allows you to develop talent as you recognize it. Quality producers lead to quality projects. Best of luck.

Now for your next iteration, I would venture to guess that in the information distribution paradigm you recognize the ubiquity of mobile screens. The question I have is since volume is not an issue. How do you structure your information appropriately to exploit it being consumed in smaller chunks?

Dan Tanna
November 27, 2012 at 12:09 am

Loved the nut-punch to Robert Scoble, an annoying fellow I simply cannot stand and whose “success” I cannot comprehend.

I too have noticed the crapification of ads on even large mainstream sites like cnn.com and latimes.com and washpo and so on. they are serving up the worst of the worst from bottom feeder advertisers and faux ‘related stories’ banners. it reeks of desperation. clearly the end is nigh.

I suspect the problem is the middlemen — ad revenues are being sucked down by too many intermediaries in the food chain taking their slice out of real time bidding and data mining.

good luck with the ebook idea. it’s one I’ve been mulling as well.

also: love the line about Scoble. and that is the real problem, I think: quality is no longer related to success. you don’t have to be good to be popular. (you are of course both.)

[…] road and it’s still pretty cool. You see more and more ads in your Facebook profile or the page loads slowdown because of ad networks. Perhaps, you wonder how these guys are making money, but you figure someone is paying something or […]